2. Propaganda tended to depict women as guardians of the home, their gentle nature and vulnerability making them both objects of men’s affections and victims of the enemy’s barbarous acts, and yet also as resilient, active participants in the war effort. Women served as reminders of the necessity of the fight and of the companionship that awaited soldiers upon their return. Those who refused to do so, propagandists argued, would face accusation and recrimination (‘What did YOU do in the Great War, Daddy?’) and would be spurned by sweethearts. Propaganda urging women to ‘wait, weep, and be worthy’ accompanied direct appeals to mobilize. Campaigns exhorted them to nurse injured servicemen, temporarily take up untraditional occupations, and to manufacture arms for the front. Numerous publications valorized ‘our adaptable women’, now farmers, station-masters, stokers, railway greasers, bricklayers, carpenters, butchers, brewers, and chimney sweeps.

6. While Dorothy Lawrence was forced to keep her adventure silent, as the British Army very much feared the ridicule it would plunge them into, another Englishwoman, Flora Sandes, published a book on her experiences as a soldier in the Serbian Army in 1916, with a view to raising funds for her brothers in arms. Sandes was initially an ambulance driver on the Eastern Front but managed to enlist with the Serbs, who by 1916 had already promoted her to sergeant-major. She stayed on after the war with the Serbian army eventually becoming a major.Flora Sandes Supposedly, Sandes was accepted by the Serbs as the personification of British war aid, a symbolic value also attached though in another sense to no doubt the most famous female combatant of the Great War: the Russian Maria Bochkareva. A soldier in the Army since 1914, wounded and decorated several times, Bochkareva convinced the revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky in 1917 that a battalion made exclusively of women would shame men grown diffident about the war into fighting.Alexander Kerensky She recruited 2,000 women out of which about 250 saw actual combat on the Austrian Front fighting together with units of male soldiers. In contrast, the Cossack Maria Yurlova, active in Armenia against the Turkish Army, saw her participation in the war rather as an adventure, though it cost her in the end a severe breakdown. Despite these exceptions the Governments involved in the war did as much as possible to prevent women's enlisting and participation in combat out of patriarchal principles.